


Evergreen

by eisenhardted



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Child Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 17:46:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5752501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eisenhardted/pseuds/eisenhardted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, you just need to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evergreen

There’s a hill outside their home in the dewy Ukrainian mountains. Just a hill, green and lush and completely innocuous. To everyone else, it’s just a clump of mud and grass, but Magda thinks it’s magic, the stuff of legend even, because it never fails to make her smile. Some of her happiest memories were forged on that grassy knoll, bought and paid for in the only currency it seemed to understand. Laughter was the debt she paid in order to feel as alive and cheerful as she did atop it’s vibrant shades of evergreen - and it was a worthy price, or so she thinks. 

She remembers racing down it barefoot, with flowers in her hair and a song upon her lips. Remembers tangling herself up in Max’s arms, when he’d shown her what it was to be loved, when they’d stared up at the clouds and pictured a life beyond the death they’d left back in Poland. She remembers braiding flowers into his hair too, and oh how he’d grimaced and flailed when she’d pinned him down and tickled him into stillness. She thinks in truth, that was the first time she’d seen him properly smile, when the warmth of renewed optimism practically radiated from his cheeks and ingrained the image of it forever into her conscience. 

She remembers how tender he was upon that hill, how loving and patient he’d been, when they’d both tried so hard to ease the wounds of a life they should never have been forced to endure. There was nothing so sweet as being tangled up in the arms of someone you cared for, when that hill had seen long before they had, that this was love plain and simple, blossoming right before naive and tired eyes. It was the place she’d first kissed him, the place she’d blushed and squirmed and realised for the first time in her life that men weren’t people she had to be afraid of. 

In truth, she supposed, that hill was also the place she came to the stark realisation that Max wasn’t a boy anymore. That he’d grown up, just as she had, into someone that above all else she was so painstakingly proud of, she started to thrive on the infectiousness of being in his presence. She dragged him up onto that hill in all weathers, chased frogs with him in the mud, grubbied her knees in the glowing sunshine and managed to acquire so many grass stains along the entirety of her back it was enough to make the elderly Sinti lady down the road glare daggers at them in stern disapproval. 

She was happy though, and so was he. It was paradise, or as close as Magda was ever going to get to it. Arms draped tightly around his shoulders, her lips pressed into his neck as she urged him on, chanting the word ‘faster’ as he tore down the grassy plain with his best friend upon his back, his fingers spread smooth and wide across her thighs as he held her in place, nylons bunching beneath his touch. They were getting too old for this, but he’d be damned if he was calling her out on it. He felt like a child, as if piggyback races and cloud watching were a viable throwback to the childhood they’d been denied. He liked having her so close, so warm and contented all because of an act of his making. The chorus of laughter that erupted was always worth it, like an angelic hymn reaching inside him and raising his spirits higher and higher. He didn’t think he could ever hear a sound he delighted in quite so much, but he’d been proved wrong. 

Anya’s laugh had been even sweeter, high pitched and exuberant when it sang out in fits and starts from the very moment of her birth. They’d taught her to walk upon that hill, watched her fall and crawl, whine and triumph as she found her first wobbly steps beneath the sun that has saved them both. Fast forward another few years, and it was Winter that had greeted them, when Max had been so paranoid about his daughter’s health that he’d bundled her up in so many layers she could barely even walk. Tiny waddling steps had led her up the hill, until she’d fallen flat on her face and rolled right down it again in a pillowy cocoon of knitwear. Magda could still remember her husband chasing after the youngster when she’d decided it was the most fun pastime of all, when both parents had been forced to stumble and pursue her over the icy terrain, as she threw herself time and time again, down the snow in an intrepid arctic roll, laughing all the way. 

It was a shame they couldn’t just live atop it, for all the joy it had brought the three of them; but like all good things, it had to come to an end. That slice of idyllic bliss was left behind to gather dust as they’d moved to Vinnitsa, as the fires of fate had consumed them and turned such memories of bliss into ash and debris in the mouth. The death of a daughter. The dissolution of a marriage. The loss of a friend. Regret was one of the few things Magda still felt, after that trio of catastrophes, but she still clung to the memories of a better life. She still clung to the precious few moment she had to declare that without a single hint of doubt she’d been truly, maddeningly happy. 

It’s why every year, on the anniversary of Anya’s death, she makes the pilgrimage back to that hill. She doesn’t know where her husband buried her firstborn, but that hill is the place she’s come to consider her grave. That hill is the place she stretches out and caresses the daisies, curls her fingers into the grass and just breathes so deeply the smell of something wild and alive. She cries for a better time, and smiles because she cherishes the precious few moments she did have there. 

That hill still feels like heaven, and in the wake of Anya’s death, maybe it really is.


End file.
